Nvidia preps GeForce 7800 GTX

Next-gen part seen behind closed doors

Computex 2005 Nvidia's upcoming G70 chip will be dubbed the GeForce 7800 GTX when it ships, sources close to a number of graphics card makers mentioned to The Register.

Quite a few even had boards based on the part humming away and rendering 3DMark demos in machines kept behind closed doors.

The latest alleged leaks suggest the part will not be launched until later this month. When it is, it will apparently sport 24 pixel pipelines fed by eight vertex pipelines, allowing the chip to churn out 860m vertices every second and colour 10.32bn pixels in the same space of time.

The 7800 will feature the latest versions of Nvidia's CineFX and Intellisample engines, with DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 support and Open GL 2.0 handled too. The chip offers 64-bit floating point texture filtering and blending, as per the 6800 series.

The GTX will support SLi, but the vanilla 7800 and 7800 GT versions will not, we hear. Core and memory speeds will very between the three versions and between different vendors' implementations, as usual, but specs we've seen mention a 430MHz core and memory clocked to 1.2GHz effective. The memory interface is 256 bits wide, and supports GDDR 3. The memory bandwidth comes to 38.4GBps. ®